Your Ouya just got a little creepier thanks to the developer of creepy platforming game, Whispering Willows. The trailer (below) shows protagonist Elena as she searches for her missing father through innovative environmental puzzles and supernatural obstacles.

“[Elena] must harness the powers of her heritage,” writes developer David Logan on the Kickstarter page, “utilizing astral projection and other ethereal abilities to find her father before he, too becomes lost to the hopeless morass of the Willows estate.”

If that (and the trailer below) doesn’t have you dusting off your tiny Android-powered gaming cube, we don’t know what will.

The first thing you notice about OUYA is that, unlike everything else stacked under your TV, it’s not a massive box that just sits there collecting dust. Rather, the Yves Behar-designed OUYA is a small and elegant piece of hardware that deserves to be on display.

Don’t let OUYA’s small size fool you, though – it was built using technology similar to what powers our smartphones and tablets, (with a bit of tweaking to the quad-core 1.7ghz processor) and is driven by Google’s open-source Android 4.1 Jellybean operating system. And Cult of Mac Deals has the OUYA for 32% off the regular price – only $85.

Although it was a great idea, this notion of a cheap Android game console, the Ouya left a lot to be desired at launch. The hardware had some obvious deficiencies, like controller dead spots, but more importantly, the game library at launch was practically non-existent.

Right now, it looks like the Ouya is a dud: a great idea that just didn’t have a chance because it couldn’t get a push. But you know who might be able to take that same idea and get developers to treat it more seriously? Amazon. And they’re working to do just that.

Pebble gave its latest smartwatch project an extra bump this morning with the new Pebble Time Steel model, which pushed the project over the mark to become the most-funded Kickstarter project ever.

Pebble Time has raked in $13,617,054 so far, pushing it past the Coolest Cooler for the top spot. Pebble also has the third-most-successful Kickstarter project with its original Pebble Watch in 2012. The Pebble Time project still has 24 days left, so it will likely push far past the $15 million mark.

“It can be polka dots one day or an image the next,” says Lara Grant, a fashion technologist working on an LED-powered handbag at San Francisco hardware incubator Highway1. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

SAN FRANCISCO — The iPhone has changed the way we do everything, from finding a date to finding a meal. Now it’s about to change the way innovative hardware gets made.

With smartphones manufactured in such massive quantities, basic components like chips and batteries have become dirt cheap. Smartphones also allow hardware to be dumber by providing processing power and a big screen. Add 3-D printers (which ease prototyping), crowdfunding (which has shaken up financing) and Github (for sharing software), and you’ve got a smartphone-fueled manufacturing revolution in the making.

“It’s the cellphone peace dividend,” said Brady Forrest, a former venture capitalist who heads up Highway1, an “incubator” for hardware startups that launched a few months ago here in the city’s Mission district. “So many are being made, prices for components are plummeting.”

At an event in New York City this morning, Amazon finally announced FireTV, its long-awaited Apple TV competitor. It’s three times faster than its competitors, with a “best in class” quad-core processor and a dedicated GPU, and it runs the latest Android games.

It’s been more than 700 days since we’ve seen an Apple TV hardware update, but Apple’s not the only company hurrying out the finishing touches on TV set-top box.

Amazon is planning to launch its answer to the Apple TV this March, according to a report from Re/code. The Amazon TV box will take aim at the Apple TV and Roku, utilizing Amazon’s growing video catalog.

Android-powered video game consoles like the Ouya haven’t exactly been a huge success, but Chinese electronics maker Huawei is hoping to change that with Tron, a device that looks remarkably similar to Apple’s new Mac Pro — albeit a lot smaller. It’s powered by a quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 4 processor and 2GB of RAM, and it’s expected to cost less than $150.

One of Cavanaugh’s previous games was a Metroid-like retro space platformer called VVVVVV. It’s available on Mac, and super fun, featuring a reversible gravity mechanic that makes the game one of the biggest charmers to hit the indie gaming scene in years. And now, it’s coming to the iPhone and iPad.

The iPad mini, announced today, is suddenly a fantastic gaming device. While the original iPad mini introduced a fantastic iPad form factor at 7.9 inches, the iPad 2-equivalent display and CPU just doesn’t quite cut it for higher-end gaming apps.

Of course, all of Apple’s iOS devices have been great for gaming ever since the App Store launched back in 2008. Games make up a huge portion of the 1,000,000 apps out there to date, and it’s not surprising anymore to see console-level gaming experiences show up on both iPad and iPhone.